Almost every professional is using LinkedIn nowadays because of its capacity to centralize a serious, work related environment in which content like social posts, distractions like commercials or hazardous pictures don’t belong and aren’t welcomed. The power of LinkedIn consists of a well built network of over 364 millions of users having common goals like hiring, finding a job or smart marketing a certain position or a company.

It’s been a while since our last post and lots of things happened in The Web Miner secret workshop so, be ready for we are about to launch a tool that should not be missed by no serious marketing department.

The problem we are trying to solve is the fast access to information that is needed to take a decision regarding the course of prices of a whole ecommerce. Just as it is said in entrepreneurship, if you heard it, it’s already to late to start a business with it, we can transcript that for those who set up the price policy of any store. They need to be in contact with the market without a break and to be aware that even for a slight change of their prices the sales could go up and down at an astonishing rate, because in the end if we neglect the rate of trust of users for certain sites or other facilities regarding shipping, all online shops are the same for final consumers.

How was this solved in the past is simple: it was not! Mainly because people were not aware of the advantages that a quick response rate to changes can give to a shop. Also before 2010 the competition between online businesses was not that high so this didn’t became a problem until rather recently.

A thought for the end is that the market will never finish evolving and that ecommerce shops haven’t reached the peak yet, and so, new rules are being added to this industry so better be aware. After all, better safe than sorry!

I want to write now about a phenomena that is a part of our lives with or without our consent. I’m talking about Apple’s market strategy and how its intrusive policy of becoming one of the most exquisite brands have affected our perception on quality or innovation.

There’s no point in denying the direct correlation between Apple total revenue and the influence it has on the market of electronics and only by looking at the graph of sales we can say so.

Further more, although the statistics that we found aren’t quite recent we can add that last week Apple inc. has sold 10 millions devices of its latest product, making it double than the original estimations. It would have been an even larger number but because of the major traffic that apple.com has had, the servers were down for a number of hours.

Now, in terms of data and what we are interested in, regarding the fact that all expectations were exceeded last week we can say that the only thing that is still bringing the money to Apple is the iPhone division. The sales of iPad are decreasing and so are the ones of Macs and iPods but even so the stocks listed are increasing their values. This can be explained only by following the history of the company from the day they were first listed back in the 90’s until now and observe that customer satisfaction and brand recognition as quality are one of the highest ever recorded.

In the end i’d like to say that even if Apple took its blows first with the competitive market of Android and Windows phones, later with the death of Steve Jobs and most recently with the flaws in the iCloud system that allowed hackers to break in and publish nude pictures of dozens of celebrities, marketing data reveals that the company is still in the top preferences of gadgets enthusiasts all over the world with a consolidated position over Samsung that will not decline too soon.

Now that the holiday is over we can get back to business with high stamina and low desire to stop. And so the big news this week is that Facebook presented its new Business Manager for entrepreneurs and marketers meant to ease up the work on different ad campaigns and even multiple pages from one account, a well received feature. Another feature of it, is that allows tasks for different users on the same project by adding or revoking permissions.

In order to use Business Manager you have to first set up your account, which makes you a so called ‘a business ad man’ – a position in which you can modify all aspects of the business. Another new feature is that you can assign tasks even to people who are not your Facebook friends and you don’t know anymore that a work email.

Even though it seems like a very well intended tool TechCrunch tends to point out that it is a bit of a reachout for Facebook. Even considering this, the ability for small business owners, who don’t have big budgets, to be successful on Facebook will directly correlate to their ability to quickly manage their pages, content, and ads to drive engagement.
We can only hope that Facebook continues releasing tools that make it easy for small businesses (not just fortune 500 brands) to have success on the platform.

If you’ve been active on twitter lately you may have noticed the major changes that happened on the micro-blogging platform. Since it has been founded, in 2006 twitter has distinguished itself from other platforms by revolutionized the way people communicate on the internet. It imposed that people should only deliver the essential of their message by setting up a 140 character limit and so it reinvented the wheel.

Now in the last few days twitter has implemented a new design for user’s profiles and it’s nothing of what we are used to. Instead of the regular plain customizable profile we we have a facebook-like page with the main picture and bio scaled to the left and significantly more real estate dedicated to the header photo. The new look has a greater focus on photos and content cards.

Also this change in looks brought a new category with it, called “out on the profile” , where you can view who you are following, followers, favorites and lists.

Major brands had not skipped the opportunity to promote along with this changes and had almost immediately responded by redesigning their pages (in the photos:Samsung and Kia)

If the new profile hasn’t reached you yet it’s not to worry about because the changes will be slowly implemented to users in random manner so your turn will come up, only with more followers we hope.

I don’t know about you but i haven’t given very much thought of how do i feel the instance that i press the “share” button. I recently found out that i was ignoring a much more important part of online marketing than it seems, and i corrected myself, all because of emotions.

When it comes to what we feel, everything can be expressed as a sum of four basic emotions: happy, sad, afraid and angry, that combine themselves and form a variety of other feelings about which we may or we may not be aware. For better understanding of this we may look at Robert Plutchik’s famous “wheel of emotions” that shows just some of the well known emotional layers.

Studies have also revealed that the emotional state that “gets” the most of the likes is happiness, which is normal if we consider that our first emotional action in life is to respond to our mother’s smile with a smile of our own. Obviously, joy and happiness are hard-wired into all of us, as discovered by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. And because happiness almost never comes as a self sustainable feeling we can see that the top 10 emotions that people have when sharing something are made of positive ones, as studied by Fractl.

More than this Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, conducted a study from which he found that an article was more likely to become viral the more positive it was.

Of course we shouldn’t neglect that there are also other feelings that may interact with our online behavior. For instance sadness helps us connect and empathize by producing cortisol, known as the “stress hormone”; and oxytocin, a hormone that promotes connection and empathy. Further research revealed that when we are angry the hypothalamus makes us more stubborn and fear only makes us more desperate to find something or someone to cling on.

Considering all this information is easy to understand the high significance of emotions in marketing, especially when considering that an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns where, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content.

And this is why we can’t underestimate the importance of understanding the science of emotion in marketing!

When you open a new website, what do you first look at? Do you think is the same thing that i look at, or any other person? You may be tempted to say no, that we are different persons with different interest so we don’t look at the same things but science research tends to disagree with that affirmation.

Recently, more and more companies that study visitors behavior on web sites appeared, and one of them, EyeQuant, also affiliated with Google has just published the results of a study in which 46 subjects were requested to browse over 200 sites. The result came as a surprise, in the benefit of the company because it turns out what people are really interested in. First of all against the popular belief people aren’t that interested in faces or large font writings but rather in small sets of text and instruments that are available on the first page.

Also another interesting idea came out from the analysis of sites that were offering something free. Although economically it’s almost impossible to beat something free, it seems like people are not that interested in big adverts of free stuff.

So, in conclusion here is some important information that you shouldn’t skip if you plan on launching your own internet company. We’re not saying that otherwise you will fail but it’s always better to know your customers a little bit better than they know themselves!